I still think the multi touch MacBook is going to come out. Apple’s touch interface is just too good. It deserves to be featured in more products.
But I am going to make another prediction. At yesterday’s 3rd quarter results conference call Apple’s Peter Oppenheimer got cheeky when discussing the next quarter’s projections. Gross profit will be down, and it will be due to product transitions. This past quarter Apple’s GP was about 34% on sales of $7.8 billion. Next quarter they see this dropping to 30-31%.
What could cause such a drop? It will have to be a lower margin product that will sell in high volumes. This is a head scratcher because Apple is disciplined when it comes to setting prices. In my opinion they would only sell a loss leader (low profit) product if it were going increase market share and/or drive sales of other products. In this case I think that product is Mobile Me.
Mobile Me is Apple’s first salvo in the cloud computing race (I don’t count .Mac because it was terrible). It offers storage, email, chat and applications all hosted online. Its easy to imagine more of the iLife suite and even iWork being available soon through this service. Apple is not improving Safari’s AJAX performance for nothing, and they certainly are not doing this so that Macs will work better with other company’s cloud services.
At first I thought Mobile Me might be a case of Apple targetting a piece of the Windows market by skipping the OS business and instead chasing recurring subscriptiuon revenue – and that might still happen. The idea being, let Microsoft have their $50/OEM license revenue. Apple would rather take $99/year per computer thank you very much. But now I think Mobile Me’s primary role might be to support a new product category.
This new product would be a cloud computer notebook – like an Asus Eee but with Apple’s design flair and quality. It might come with a year of Mobile Me out of the box (or a suitable duration for evaluation). It would be running a light version of Leopard – whose features will be rolled into next year’s Snow Leopard release. Safari, Mail, Widgets and other cool Apple software would be included – but no iLife.
Hardware would consist of a compact (plastic) chassis housing an extremely power efficient architecture, adequate RAM and a small amount of SSD storage. I don’t know if there would be benefit to the touch interface in such a product, but who knows.
Have I seen this? Heck no. This is just my imagination speaking, but it isn’t hard to imagine something like this coming to market. I’d buy one.
